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Scoring Musicals/Opera MusicXML/Cubase

Hi,

I am working a large piece with voice, dialogue, etc. (a 'musical'). I have been using Cubase to mock up the various music bits. Surprisingly, I have found the latest scoring functions to be not half bad for what I need.
Unfortunately, it still has some serious shortcomings in terms of adding lyrics, dialogue, stage directions and so on... the stuff that has to be in an engraved score for this type of music.

Ideally, I would love it if Cubase had features for all that stuff, but until such a day, I'm wondering if anyone here has experience in using Cubase for this sort of thing and how you handle this.

I live in Cubase so I don't think moving wholesale to something like Sibelius or Finale would be for me. I definitely would consider buying them if they could import from Cubase cleanly -and- could incorporate the other staging/dialogue/lyric stuff.

In my dream world, my DAW program would have the features of a screen writing program. ie. If a character is singing a lyric or speaking, I could immediately jump to other bars or page where they were on stage -and- generate reports for each 'character'. It would also have the ability to add free-form pages of just text (staging and dialogue) as 'objects' and be able to move all these around as true 'scenes' like in a movie. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I often think of this like a screenplay that includes music and wish Cubase (or any other DAW) allowed for that kind of music/visual workflow.

Anyhoo, I have been looking at an open source program called 'LilyPond' which produces marvelous looking output, but would be a terror to input large projects into. Fortunately, it does import MusicXML. So I am thinking of trying to export from Cubase as MusicXML into LilyPond and then add the other lyrics, stage directions, etc. in Lilypond.